“Humanistic” City in the Age of “Capitalocene”

Abstract

The humbling climate crisis of the twenty-first century poses a challenge to classical humanism that cherishes the spontaneity of human action and its possibility of instigating newness. With more-than-human philosophies on the mainstream horizon, there remains a conundrum regarding how one can retain the “humanistic” core while attending to the arresting gravity of environmental degradation. This article addresses this enigma in three ways. First, we synthesize urban environmentalism debates and their embattled relationship with humanistic concerns; second, we illuminate everyday creative interventions that urban youth themselves are generating in their continual negotiations between individual and social, old and new, vernacular and technical; and third, we deflect the linear projection of a “Capitalocene” future by exhibiting contingent practices of southern urbanism. Accordingly, we propose new ways of reinventing urban environmentalism that see humans as a part of its divergent future landscapes. Our version of humanistic city frames the urban as a provisional space in which youth socialities and sensibilities are seen as emerging potentialities calibrating the pace of spatial transitions.

经典人文主义珍视人类行动的自发性及其引发新事物的可能性。然而, 21世纪的气候危机, 给经典人文主义带来了挑战。随着超人类哲学出现于主流哲学中, 关注环境退化严重性同时保留“人文主义”核心, 仍然是一个难题。本文从三个方面探讨了这个谜团。首先, 综述了城市环保主义的争论及其与人文考虑的紧张关系。其次, 阐述了个人与社会、新与旧、本土与技术的持续妥协中, 城市青年建立的日常创造性干预。第三, 通过展示南方城市主义的实践, 转移了对“资本世”未来的线性预测。因此, 本文提出了重塑城市环保主义的新方法——将人类视为不同未来景观的一部分。本文提出的人文城市将城市定义为临时空间, 青年人的社交性和情感性是调整城市空间变化速度的新潜力。

La humillante crisis climática del siglo XX plantea un desafío al humanismo clásico que valora la espontaneidad del accionar humano y su posibilidad de instigar novedad. Con filosofías más-que-humanas en el horizonte de la corriente de moda, sigue vivo un enigma sobre cómo puede uno retener el núcleo “humanístico” al tiempo que se atiende la sobrecogedora gravedad de la degradación ambiental. Este artículo aborda aquel enigma de tres maneras. Primero, sintetizamos los debates del ambientalismo urbano y su conflictiva relación con las preocupaciones humanistas; segundo, iluminamos las intervenciones creativas cotidianas que los propios jóvenes urbanos están generando con sus negociaciones continuadas entre lo individual y lo social, lo viejo y lo nuevo, lo vernáculo y lo técnico; y tercero, desviamos la proyección lineal de un “capitaloceno” futuro exhibiendo las prácticas contingentes del urbanismo meridional. Por eso, proponemos nuevas formas de reinventar un ambientalismo urbano que vea los humanos como una parte de sus paisajes divergentes futuros. Nuestra visión de la ciudad humanista enmarca lo urbano como un espacio provisional en el que las socialidades y sensibilidades de la juventud son vistas como potencialidades emergentes que calibran el ritmo de las transiciones espaciales.

Key Words:

• Kampala and Nairobi
• people as infrastructure
• post-Western ontologies and knowledge systems
• urban environmentalism
• urban youth

关键词:

• 坎帕拉和内罗毕
• 人作为基础设施
• 后西方本体论和知识体系
• 城市环保主义
• 城市青年

Palabras clave:

• ambientalismo urbano
• juventud urbana
• Kampala y Nairobi
• la gente como infraestructura
• ontologías y sistemas del conocimiento pos-occidentales

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Nobody, in fact, “chose” to be born into this world, so this is perhaps a moot point in a grander scheme of things, but from the perspective of youth (who might now consider themselves as a social or political agent capable of making a difference), these existential considerations might hold some truth.

2 Haraway (2016) cogently summarized the history of the “Capitalocene” concept, discussing the catastrophic consequences of capitalist-driven globalization and modernization—particularly writing against “the managerial, technocratic, market-and-profit besotted, modernizing, and human-exceptionalist business-as-usual commitments” (see Moore 2017). In proposing more radical actions to counter the Capitalocene status quo, Haraway (2016) made the famed claim, “Make Kin, Not Babies!” (161). Mattheis (2022) offered a conceptual elaboration on such a nonnatalist claim, drawing attention to the politics of resisting state-building pronatalism (as in normalization of heteronormative procreation) while advocating for prochild kinship-making.

3 Harambee (distributionism) and Chamaa (collectivism; i.e., through welfare or investment groups) in Kenya refer to a trend among urban societies toward contributing time and energy to collective work (Guma 2021).

4 Ujamaa, literally translated, refers to “familyhood” or “brotherhood” in Swahili, a local dialect in eastern Africa (Guma 2016). In a broader sense, it refers to a form of cooperative economics, in the sense of people cooperating to self-provide the essentials of life.

5 Ubuntu is an epistemological and humanistic metaphor that embodies the significance of possessing relational, collectivist, intuitive, and contemplative ideals in a community (see Guma 2012). It offers an important counterweight to the individualism apparent in contemporary cities, as well as a reminder that cities are not homogenous sociocultural entities, but spheres that exhibit variegated forms.

6 A recent innovation that provides financial transaction services via mobile phone. The service allows users to store, send, and receive money funds electronically.

7 Through this practice, elders would sound a drum to call on all those concerned, often with the goal to ignite communal and cultural obligations for integration, inclusion, and participation.

8 According to Cajete (1994), “ecosophy” is the term that describes “the integration of environmental knowledge with physical, social, mythological, psychological and spiritual life characteristic of Indigenous societies” (197).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ihnji Jon

IHNJI JON is a Lecturer in Human Geography at The School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3WA, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include environmental gentrification, more-than-human urban political ecology, pragmatism (philosophy), and situated value logics beyond marketization.

Prince Guma

PRINCE GUMA is a Research Associate at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. His work, situated at the intersection of science and technology studies, urban studies, and postcolonial studies, explores the multiple ways through which cities and infrastructure domains are constructed and reconstructed through the diffusion and uptake of new plans, ideas, and technologies.

AbdouMaliq Simone

ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE is Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. He is also co-director, the Beyond Inhabitation Lab, Polytechnic University of Turin and visiting professor at the African Center for Cities, University of Cape Town. For four decades he has worked with practices of social interchange, technical arrangements, local economy, and the constitution of power relations that affect how heterogeneous African and Southeast Asian cities are lived.